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Then
Strange summer of 1930
by Larry Chabot
The year was 1930. Walt Disney invented Mickey Mouse, Twinkies first appeared in stores and Scotch Tape stuck around. Money was cheap: a billion dollars in 1930 would equal 12 billion now. Gasoline was ten cents a gallon, steak twenty cents a pound and a good union suit at Penney’s cost $1.98.
At 7:30 p.m. on July 11 of that strange year, movie stuntman Jerry Hudson emerged from a crowd of 2,000 people, spit on his hands and climbed the outside of Marquette’s Northland Hotel, just as he promised he would. Known as “The Human Fly,” Hudson was a professional building climber, having scaled New York’s sixty-two-story Woolworth Building and, just recently, the Hotel Scott in Hancock and the Calumet Theatre, as several thousand spectators cheered him on.
“He’ll go up bare-handed,” his manager boasted, to do acrobatic stunts atop the hotel. The exhibition had been preapproved by no less than Marquette mayor E.J. Hudson, police chief T.T. Hurley, and hotel manager M.E. Scott. After a brisk seven-minute climb, the acrobat wowed the crowd by doing tricks with a table and chairs, ending the show by standing on his head on the building’s very edge.
“Wow!” said Christine Pesola, chief executive officer of the Landmark Inn (as the Northland is now known). “I never heard of this. But nobody could do that now. The liability alone would be too much, and we’d be afraid of them falling. But in those days, it must have been fun to see.”
That’s not all that enlivened the Northland. Referring to haunting legends, Pesola said there have been sightings and feelings by guests.
“One lady was on the bed facing the window when she opened her eyes and saw someone on the couch,” she said. “She was really scared, and she never knew of the legends. People tell us that strange things happened to them here. For instance, the switchboard would show a phone being used in a locked and empty room, or an indent in a couch cushion when no one had been in there.”
A Web site devoted to haunted inns claims the hotel has hosted several ghosts, claiming paranormal researchers found evidence to prove it. For instance, in 1930, a local librarian fell in love with a Great Lakes sailor, whom she would meet on the sixth floor.
On his final voyage, he perished at sea, and visitors claim to have seen the grieving woman walking the halls in mourning. One guest reported finding metal screws under his bedsheets. And men working in the basement, where a boarder reportedly hid a woman he’d murdered, said they distinctly heard crying and whispering.
The lonely passenger
Sixteen years after the country’s first scheduled airline passenger service was launched in Florida, the U.P. welcomed Foster Air Lines and its ten-seat, twin-engine Sikorsky flying boat.
After startup was delayed by company president James Foster’s surgery, the line began round-trip service from St. Ignace to Newberry, Manistique, Iron Mountain, Crystal Falls and back to St. Ignace, with connections to Detroit and Chicago. The U.P. loop covered 500 miles at $40 for the round-trip. After spending $60,000 and twenty-four months getting ready, Foster Air carried only one passenger during its first ten days of operation, so Foster abandoned the U.P.
While Foster was flying its lonely route, an aerial circus from New York was working the Menominee City Airport. The show was marred by the death of twenty-three-year-old jumper Carl Meo, whose parachute failed to open.
Also in 1930, pilot Clyde Lee of Marquette headed for Mexico with passengers Walter Koepp and Mrs. William Gasper to meet with Mr. Gasper, who was working there. Because the plane couldn’t clear Mexican customs, they made the final leg by train. The exhausting round trip took forty-one hours.
The western U.P. was represented in Congress by W. Frank James of Lake Linden, known as “The Flying Congressman,” who flew wherever he went. He told a reporter that he had 75,000 miles on his current plane, barely avoiding death a dozen times as he visited all forty-eight states on Congressional business.
A rare aviation first involved a Missouri cow named Elm Farm Ollie, who became the first of her species to fly in a plane while being milked. Under the talented fingers of a Wisconsin farmer, Ollie yielded twenty-four quarts on a seventy-two-mile trip to a St. Louis air show. The milk was parachuted to waiting spectators (including famous flyer Charles Lindbergh).
Alcoholic adventures
With alcohol still banned under Prohibition, illegal stills and breweries were as numerous as telephone poles. In one summer month, the federal court in Marquette handled sixty liquor violations. A major haul came in a Negaunee raid, which netted three thirty-gallon stills, 1,600 gallons of grain mash, 130 gallons of whiskey, twelve of wine and thirty-six quarts of beer, all from one man’s basement. Five vehicles were needed to haul it all away.
Among Marquette County headaches was a mother-daughter team who were constant burrs under police saddles. One 1930 night, the daughter was found drunk on a road and hauled to court, where she pleaded not guilty and demanded a jury trial. She wasn’t drunk, she claimed, but her mother was, and they should find her and pick her up. Evidence showed the daughter’s husband, brother and stepfather were serving time in three different lockups, and her kids had been taken away by the county. Courts and cops were ever at odds with this loony pair, “who permit men of the lowest type to frequent their home.”
Professional bums—called the Canned Heat Gang by local police—lived in a shack in West Ishpeming where they drank cheap booze and begged on the streets for money to buy more. Law enforcement usually left them alone if they behaved themselves, but often broke up fights among the residents.
Check-bouncers abounded. A “Wisconsin stranger” in a Model-T Ford, fresh from spreading rubber checks in Baraga County, was active in Ishpeming, writing large phony drafts for small purchases and walking off with lots of change. During this time, one or two young women (accounts varied) wrote bad checks on a nonexistent Negaunee National Bank account, waving a forged deposit slip as “proof” of their solvency.
Three Negaunee men were arrested for stealing tires from the car of an Iron River visitor. When the owner caught up to the thieves, he was beaten badly with a wrench. Also in Negaunee, two young chaps ordered lunch in a downtown restaurant, then walked out with the food, cups, saucers and spoons before Marquette police scooped them up.
In Ishpeming, a man being arraigned for molesting snuck out while the judge and police officer were conferring, but his freedom lasted only a few minutes. In another west end case, young boys were peeping into bedrooms and bathrooms. A neighborhood-watch group caught them in the act, and also snagged some boys shooting at passing cars with a .22 rifle.
The beat goes on
A national craze for high-rise sitting—atop poles, buildings and trees—hit the U.P. as a Bessemer boy named Hugo Aho set a new U.P. tree-sitting record with 270 hours before he fell from the tree and was injured slightly . . .
—Larry Chabot
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